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The Effects of Federal Adoption Incentive Awards for Older Children on Adoptions from U.S. Foster Care | JPAM Featured Article

When children in foster care cannot be reunified with their parents, adoption is considered a better option for permanent placement over long-term foster care. The federal Adoption Incentives program was established in 1997 to provide annual performance bonuses to states for increases in adoptions from U.S. foster care. This paper uses changes to the Adoption Incentives program in 2003 and 2008 to analyze states’ responses to the federal performance bonuses.

IMPAQ International, LLC recently announced that it has been selected by the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) to develop a descriptive statistical profile of women veterans and their economic and employment characteristics. The Columbia-based, woman-owned firm will also inventory programs that explicitly or implicitly target women veterans in DOL and across other Federal agencies. The goal is to determine the extent of existing employment services available for this group.

The study is slated to take up to one year to complete, and comes as part of DOL’s “Women Veteran Employment Initiative,” which aims to identify challenges for women veterans and improve services offered to them.

Citing current Population Survey statistics from the Census Bureau, Dr. Steven Garasky, Vice President of Human Services at IMPAQ and Project Director stated that currently women veterans have higher unemployment rates than both non-veteran women and veteran men. He added that issues related to unemployment among women veterans and the challenges they face when returning from deployment are not as well-known as those facing men.

“Who are these women veterans? What kind of lives do they lead after serving their country? What kind of challenges are they facing? What is being done to help them? These are some of the questions we hope to help the Department of Labor to answer,” said Garasky, an expert in labor economics and econometrics. He noted that BLS, the Census Bureau, and several states have developed some descriptive statistics about women veterans, but that nothing at this level has been done before.

“Of course, we are taking these studies into account, but we want to know significantly more. We want to know about the demographic attributes of women veterans relative to male veterans, to non-veteran women, and the population as a whole. We want to know their education levels, prevalence of homelessness and poverty, hours worked, salaries, household composition and other attributes that can help inform DOL as they try to help those most in need.”

Sharon Benus, CEO and co-founder of IMPAQ, welcomed the firm’s selection. She added that the study comes at a time when there are close to 200,000 women serving in the military, increasing momentum towards further integrating women into combat units, and more than two million woman veterans.

“We are a company that is driven by the fact that our work can improve lives, and this study is a perfect opportunity to have a positive, real-world impact on millions of women. That is why we are very proud to play a role in shining a light on the lives of these brave veterans – women who have chosen to serve our country - and in understanding how best to support them.”